


Haunting Voices

by captainkippen



Series: JATP Secret Santa 2020 [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Identity Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28192929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainkippen/pseuds/captainkippen
Summary: The first time Luke hears the singing, it's an accident.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Series: JATP Secret Santa 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2065386
Comments: 14
Kudos: 191
Collections: jatpdaily secret santa 2020





	Haunting Voices

**Author's Note:**

> This is a secret santa gift for [jatp-headcannon-theories](https://jatp-headcannon-theories.tumblr.com/) over on tumblr. A big thanks to [jatp-daily](https://jatp-daily.tumblr.com/) for organising!

**i.**

The first time Luke hears the singing, it's an accident. It's after hours, inching ever-closer to curfew, and the music building is empty around him (...at least, that’s what he’d thought). He'd snuck back in to grab his guitar — he and his roommates aren’t allowed to keep their instruments in their bedroom anymore, thanks to all the noise complaints from last year — wanting to try out a couple of new ideas he'd had before going to bed. He'd made it all of ten feet past the first practice room before stopping in his tracks.

There’s a light on at the end of the hall. A golden glow slips out from beneath the doorway of the furthest rooming, an eerie beacon, and with it comes the distant plunking sound of piano keys. Luke’s first thought is _‘ghost!’_ , which is followed quickly by _‘oh jeez, I’m turning into Reggie’_. He stands there for a moment deliberating over what to do. The storage room is only around the corner. He could be in and out with his guitar in a matter of minutes, there are no security guards in sight to stop him just yet, but the curiosity digs at him. Who else was sneaking out on a Wednesday night to mess around in the music building of all places? It wasn’t exactly the prime place to goof off with your buddies, especially in the middle of the week. Everyone knows if you want to do that you go to the art studios where half the security cameras don’t work and footsteps echo so loud you can hear any teachers coming. 

Biting his lip, he makes a decision. Luke begins to sneak down the hall heading right past the turning that would take him to his guitar. The piano grows louder with every step and, after a moment, it switches from a gentle plunking to a thundering melody. He freezes in place one again, this time in awe. When the singing starts, he feels as though he’s been struck by lightning. The voice belongs to a girl, at least he thinks it must, soft and warm like melted butter. He’s never heard anything like it. Chills run down his spine as he creeps closer. Just a few more feet and he’ll be able to peer right into the little window in the door, see who it is...

A hand comes down on his shoulder. Later, when he retells the story to his friends he’ll make sure to emphasize that the scream he let out was very manly indeed. Whirling around, he finds himself face to face with an unimpressed Mrs Harrison.

“Mr Patterson,” she sighs. “Again? We’ve talked about this. Don’t make me call your parents.”

“But I’ve still got ten minutes ‘til curfew,” he says automatically. “I haven’t broken any rules yet.”

Her eyebrow arches at the word ‘yet’, but at the edges of her stern expression, he can see amusement lurking. 

“Then you’d better get back to the dorms. Come on, I’ll walk you out.”

When he looks back, all the lights are off and the hallway is silent, leaving no hide nor hair of another musician. 

The next morning, Luke is still relaying his experience to his roommates as they sit down in the dining hall for breakfast. Reggie listens with earnest interest, while Alex frowns through the story and Bobby doesn’t seem to hear him at all, his focus taken up by the mountain of sausages and eggs in front of him. 

"I'm telling you guys," Luke laments. "This girl had the voice of an angel."

"I thought we knew all the singers in the department though," Alex replies, squirting ketchup across his plate. "Unless it's someone from the lower school, but they're not allowed out past nine, so..."

Tuning in for the first time since they’d left their room, Bobby huffs out a laugh.

"That never stopped us from sneaking out when we were sophomores."

“Maybe it was a ghost,” Reggie offers. “You know, there’s always been that rumour that the music building is haunted.” 

“How many times...” Alex sighed. “Ghosts don’t exist, Reg.”

“You don’t know that!”

Luke decides not to mention that ghosts had been his first thought too. Instead, he cuts into their debate, pointing his fork at them with such vigour that his bacon almost goes flying.

“The point is, you gotta hear this girl sing, guys. She’s amazing. I _have_ to find out who it is.”

“Couldn’t you just ask Mrs Harrison?” Alex asks. “She must’ve seen that someone else was there.”

“I tried, she acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about. Weird, huh?”

“...ghosts,” Reggie mutters, yelping when Alex aims a kick at his ankle under the table.

**ii.**

Three nights go by before Luke can sneak out again. The teachers have been keeping a close eye on his door since Mrs Harrison caught him, they always do when he’s been in trouble, and he has to wait until they’ve let their guard down again to slip out. Saturday nights are the ideal time to head out; curfew is bumped up by an hour and the faculty seem to assume that the students don’t know half of them leave to blow off steam at a bar in down in the local town. Plus, the remaining staff left behind to keep an eye on things are outnumbered by the number of miscreants sneaking about the halls of the school. Even the security guards give up a little bit on Saturdays. As long as no one’s in any danger it’s all good.

Thankfully, he doesn’t run into anybody on his way down to the music building. Last he’d heard, a couple of juniors were planning an illicit get-together down by the lake to make the most of the dwindling warm weather and he supposes that must be where everybody is. For one terrible moment, he’s forced to consider the fact that the mystery singer might not even be there tonight and he braces himself for disappointment. 

The universe is on his side tonight.

Quietly as he can, he pushes the front door open and is immediately rewarded by the sight of the flickering light at the end of the hall. Straining his ears, he finds he can just make out the sound of somebody practising scales. It’s odd, he thinks, that somebody is using their Saturday to sneak into a school building and _practice._ Saturdays are for partying and playing video games. But, then again, here he is… spending his Saturday night snooping around _listening_ to somebody practice. He’s probably the weird one here. 

In a moment of genius, he realises that he’ll have a better view of whoever is in the room if he sneaks around the outside of the building and looks in through the wide windows. Excitement fills him as he heads for the woods behind the walls. He feels like a little kid playing spies, sneaking around unseen in the dark. 

The excitement fades the further he gets. The trees are one of the things he’s always liked most about this school, a sprawling woodland forever willing to play host to teenagers hiding away on bad days, but they’re not at all comforting in the dark. They stretch tall and ominous against the misty moonlit sky, looming over him like giants, and he fights back a shiver. 

“Luke?”

He lets out a loud yelp as he spins around, heart racing in his chest, and he finds himself looking at a familiar face half-shadowed by the night.

“Julie, oh my god,” he says, trying to regulate his harsh breaths. “You scared me.”

Laughter dances in her eyes as she watches him. Julie Molina, a sophomore, is one of the few people outside of his roommates that Luke feels truly comfortable around. They’d worked on the school play together last year, bonding over their shared taste in music, and they’ve been friends ever since. Julie keeps to herself a lot of the time, shying away from attention, though her best friend, Flynn, insists she didn’t always have such a hatred of the spotlight. It always makes Luke feel grateful that she lets him hang around her when she does, he knows he can be… well, _loud_. The centre of attention is his favourite place to be. 

“What are you doing out here?” she asks.

“Uh…” 

It occurs to him then that there’s no way to explain why he’s trudging through the woods after dark by himself without sounding like a total freak. He _could_ explain himself, Julie doesn’t seem to mind when him being a weirdo most of the time, she would probably even laugh, but there’s a small part of him that wants to hold his discovery close to his chest and keep it safe right now. 

“Just walking… you know, clearing my head,” he says.

“Oh.” Her eyes pierce right through him like she knows he’s lying, but she doesn’t fight him on it. “Mind if I come with?”

“Sure thing.”

Spending the evening with Julie sounds better than being a spy anyway. When they walk side by side, her hand sometimes brushing his, he pretends not to notice how the movement sends shivers up his arms in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.

“You catch the ghost?” Reggie asks hopefully as his slouches back into the dorm two hours later. Alex and Bobby are already fast asleep.

Luke smiles but shakes his head.

“No such thing as ghosts, Reg.”

“Tell that to the music ghost.” 

  
  


**iii.**

The third time that Luke hears the singing, he does not try to snoop. It’s been a long week – he’s had two detentions, been berated over the phone by his mom for a bad grade on a test, and an unusually long session with the school counsellor he’s forced to see left him feeling drained of energy. When he heads into the music building that night it’s with no particular aim. It’s with some surprise that he realises the light to the far practice room is on, music drifting through the air, that beautiful voice a low murmur echoing through the halls. He simply sinks down against the wall and buries his face in his arms, listening. He’s just so tired...

Luke startles awake several hours later to find the lights off and the halls silent. Under his head, an unfamiliar sweater has been tucked there as a makeshift pillow. He runs his fingers across the soft fabric and wonders why the ghost didn’t wake him up. 

**iv.**

“So Reggie tells me you’re hunting ghosts now,” Julie greets him as she slides into the seat across the table. “What? Is being a rockstar not an exciting enough dream now or…?”

Luke balls up a loose page of notes and throws it at her, revelling in the warm laugh she lets out.

“It’s not ghost hunting,” he says. “It’s…”

He racks his brain.

“Talent… scouting…”

Julie stares at him for a moment and then cracks up again. Luke scowls, ducking his head so she won’t see the involuntary twitch of his lips as he fights the urge to join in. Her laugh is so infectious.

“Why are you so obsessed with finding out who it is anyway?” she asks.

Luke shrugs. He thinks about the sweater, a clean yellow bundle that looks out of place in the boys’ room where it sits on Luke’s desk like a question daring him to give the correct answer. It nags at him. He’s certain he’s seen it before but he can’t think where. The truth is, there’s something about this mysterious stranger, their kind touch, their voice… he can’t keep his mind off them. Something about the way lonely she sings in the dark makes his heart ache in understanding. 

“You’re good at algebra, right? Here, can you help me out?” he asks, pushing all thoughts of loneliness aside.

Julie rolls her eyes but leans forward to take his work. He watches with a lazy smile as her looping scrawl makes its way across the margins, correcting his mistakes. He’s lucky he has Julie. He never feels alone when he’s with her. He wonders, briefly, when he finds out the identity of the mystery singer if it will make him think of Julie’s deep brown eyes any less. He doesn’t think so.

The next step seems obvious to him. It’s a Tuesday evening and Luke leaves dinner early to prepare himself. The practice room is empty when he arrives, all the lights of the building still on, and he hides himself away in the corner as best he can, hoping that the piano obscures him from the doorway’s view. It’s the most patient he’s ever been in his life. A couple of hours trickle by in slow drips and drops, he entertains himself on his phone for a little while and then curses himself for not bringing a charger until, finally, the lights of the building begin to click off. He sits there with bated breath, hoping, _praying_ , that this was not all for nothing.

Then come the footsteps. 

The piano has done as much to hide his view of the door as it has to hide him from it. As it creaks open slowly, all he can see is a pair of generic black sneakers. He begins to lean forward, eager to get a glimpse of his ghost, but then…

**_CRASH!_ **

_“What on earth are you kids doing?!”_

Down the hall, there’s the sound of manic laughter. Mrs Harrison’s distant shouts follow a group of freshmen boys as they hurtle out of the building. The door slams shut, sneakers disappearing behind it again, and Luke curses. Of all the nights for other idiots to cause a fuss. Hopping to his feet, he races to the door and pulls it open, but the hallway is empty. There’s no sign that anybody was here, save for the front door falling shut. His ghost is long gone. 

Luke sighs. What’s he doing? This is getting insane. Whoever it is…. whatever it is (because as much as he hates to admit it to himself he’s actually starting to entertain some of Reggie’s theories now) clearly doesn’t want to be found. He shoves his hands in his pockets and heads down the corridor with his head wrapped up in dejected thoughts.

It’s a complete stroke of luck, then, that he notices it – the loose sheet of paper that has fluttered to the ground. There are neat little pencilled-in notes scrawled all over the dark ledger lines. Luke leans down to pick it up, letting his eyes scan over it, and it’s with slow-dawning excitement that he realises he recognises this song. It’s _the_ song. The one the mysterious voice has been singing. Whoever it is, they must’ve dropped the page in their haste to leave.

Peering closer at the writing, something extraordinary happens. A lightbulb flickers to life in his brain. That looping scrawl…

Carefully, he folds the paper up and slips it into his pocket. He remembers nothing of his journey back to the dorms, his head too full of speculation to see.

**v.**

The girls’ dorm is strictly out of bounds after curfew. Luke acknowledges this, ignores it and slips past the snoozing security guard in the student lounge to head up the stairs. The girls' dorm is quieter than the boys' — it's almost eerie as he creeps down the corridor. Usually, on their floor at least, he can expect to run into somebody coming in or out of the bathroom, or overhear the sounds of his neighbours yelling at their PlayStation, but not here. There's a short burst of cackling laughter from one door he passes and it startles him so much he stumbles sideways into the wall with a thud. Luke freezes, but none of the doors open and nobody comes running. He breathes and continues on.

His destination is all the way at the end of the third floor and when he finally reaches the door, he hesitates before he knocks. What if he’s wrong? Maybe he should leave a mystery a mystery. After all, if he _is_ right, then there’s probably a reason he didn’t know the truth in the first place.

The curiosity burns at him. That voice haunts him. He _has_ to know.

He knocks.

“I need to talk to you,” he says as the door opens.

Julie’s face is pure resignation when she sees the sheet music in his hand.

They slip out into the moonlight together, Julie leaving her roommates behind with quiet reassurances for their concerned tones, and hold their breaths through a near-miss with a patrolling teacher. The lake is shadow-dark and sparkling beneath the stars, stretching out before them as they settle at the trunk of a tree. Fall mist is creeping across the forest floor obscuring the distant paths. It’s spooky. Luke thinks if Julie wasn’t here to hold him steady then he might have run away already.

“I stopped playing after my mom died,” she explained quietly. “I just… couldn’t. You know? And then when I started again, I don’t know, I guess I just got nervous. So I kept it to myself. Mrs Harrison’s been trying to get me back into the music programme. The idea of playing in public again is… it’s a lot. That’s why I’ve been practising so much.”

“How come you never said anything?” Luke asks, but they both know what he really means.

 _How come you didn’t tell_ me?

Julie shrugs, picking at the grass by her feet.

“At first I didn’t tell anyone… and then Reggie told me you’d heard me playing, he didn’t know it was me obviously, but you were so excited about it. I just, I don’t know, I guess I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

He stares at her for a moment. The light casts strange shadows on her face, but he doesn’t miss the glimpse of sadness there. Reaching out, he takes her hand gently in his and intertwines their fingers with a squeeze.

“As if you could ever disappoint me,” he says. “Julie… this is _awesome._ How could I be upset that it’s you? I… I _wanted_ it to be you. Do you even know how much I love talking to you? And now we have even more to talk about.”

She looks up at him, eyes wide.

“You mean that?”

“Dude, I’ve liked you since the day we first met.”

When she kisses him, he hears music.

**vi.**

The first time Julie sings for Luke, it’s not an accident. It’s after hours, curfew pressing in close, but Mrs Harrison is three doors down and they have permission to be there. They sit together, a shoulder leaning against a shoulder, hunched over the piano keys as though they’re in prayer. 

Julie’s voice is a thunderstorm bringing rain to the desert in drought. Luke wonders, as she sings, how he ever mistook her for a ghost. Nothing he’s ever experienced has felt as alive as this. She is the warm air on a summer evening, the burning embers of a fireplace in the dark, the spark that sets a revolution ablaze…

Her voice is haunting, but she is there, and Luke loves her so much he burns from it.


End file.
